Essay by Victor Davis Hanson
Published on Twitter 10/09/23 4:37 PM
They Kill, While Our Government Tweets and Deletes….
If wild reports are true that the inhuman Hamas will execute dozens of civilian hostages, and if it is further accurate that there are rumored Americans among them—and if Americans then are to be executed by Hamas—aside from a military response, the United States will have to change radically its policies in the Middle East.
In the last 32 months they have been proven utterly disastrous. Hamas has gone full ISIS, and is now in addition reportedly beheading captured Israeli soldiers.
Note that the Mahmoud Abbas, “president” for life of the PNA, and a recipient of U.S. aid, has been cheering on Hamas.
So of course have the usual suspects, such as the hard Western Left, the Ivy-League pampered student crowd, the Squad constituencies, the Taliban, Qatar, especially Iran, the parent of the current mass killing, and even Turkey.
Is it the mass mutilations, the rapes, the desecrations of corpses, the beheadings, the murdering of women, the elderly, and children, that so excites them all—as if they were gleefully watching sacrificial victims marched up to the top of an Aztec temple in ancient Tenochtitlán?
Or rather is their frenzy due to unspoken terror that Hamas at last has gone too far in its premodern savagery? There are now no more of its patrons with the power to call off the IDF. And so they may finally get the existential war that Hamas always for decades had bragged about and begged for.
And the proper response to all this here in the U.S.?
All monies to the West Bank and Gaza should be immediately cut off. The Iran transfers, if our State Department’s pleas are correct that they are not yet finalized, should be stopped immediately.
Sanctions and embargos should be placed on all Iranian exports. The alternative would be to keep subsidizing those who provide the wherewithal for murderers, rapists and precivilizational mutilators. If it is true that Hamas killer-masterminds have been residing in Qatar, and, as often has been alleged, enjoying Qatar as a financial clearing-house for terrorist operations, and given Qatar has been blaming Israel for its own murdered, then why do we persist in basing the United States Central Command (USCC) and United State Air Force Central Command (USAFCC) at Qatar government facilities?
There are, of course, realist arguments for our relationship with Qatar. But the world in the Middle East has now irrevocably changed and we need to make the necessary adjustments and separate from this de facto Al Jazeerist enemy.
Expect some terrorists to attempt to join the swarm at our open border. And soon “refugees” from Gaza and the West Bank will be likely demanding asylum here in the Great Satan.
In reaction, we should not only bar all travel from Palestinian territories into the US, as well as from Iran and Qatar, but yank all visas of any of those nationals who currently reside in the U.S. and send them home to enjoy the advantages now offered on nightly video displays in their own native countries.
The national security team of this administration—gifts from the failed Obama administration that is responsible for much of the current Middle East mess— remains confused and inept.
And that’s a charitable assessment. It of course starts at the top. Joe Biden is neither physically nor cognitively up to the task of Commander in Chief in a crisis. He has more or less disappeared other than offering an occasionally brief appearance where he mumbles about standing with Israel and then vanishes again.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently deleted a tweet calling for an immediate cease-fire–music to the ears of Hamas and Iran.
Why? Does he believe it is moral to allow Hamas to murder 900 Jews, beat their chests about such savagery, and then head home with human trophies to be tortured and executed without a response?
Blinken noted that he and the Turkish foreign minister had talks that led to such an absurd statement.
And what about Turkey, the erstwhile Obama key to the Middle East?
Its intrusive armed drone was shot down recently in Syria by the US Air Force and remains an unapologetic pro-Hamas partisan.
And whether long-term it can remain in NATO—long opposing Sweden’s entry, chronic overflights of the Greek islands in the Aegean, supplier of weapons to Russia, threatening to send missiles into Athens, a security risk anytime it receives US weapons—is a real concern, given it has the largest, non-US army in NATO and hosts a nuclear-armed U.S. base.
Blinken also blasted critics who deplored his outreach to Iran, disparaging them as misinforming and misinformed.
He is petulant because he knows that the Iranian expectation of an upcoming $6 billion US-driven cash transfer (another sick idea to buy back hostages from a murderous Tehran) gives them in the here and now fungible opportunities to send more cash and arms into the hands of anti-Israeli terrorists.
As far as Iran’s role in the Hamas orgy of killing, Blinken also declared that there is no evidence of "anything that shows us that Iran was directly involved in this attack, in planning it or in carrying it out.”
No one but you, Secretary Blinken, believes that. When one remembers Blinken’s Palestinian Affairs office in the State Department and its even worse ceasefire tweet, which, like Blinken’s, disappeared without comment, the appointment of the Iranian megaphone Robert Malley (currently under investigation by the FBI) as our point man on the bankrupt Iran Deal, and Blinken’s recent brag about all the hundreds of millions of dollars we have sent to the Palestinians, the picture is one of partisan incompetence.
That pattern goes all the way back to the 2021 Chinese humiliation in Anchorage of both Blinken and Jake Sullivan.
Or perhaps both were suspect even earlier when we recall it was campaign honcho Blinken who on the eve of the 2020 election apparently thought up the nasty idea of calling on ex-interim CIA director Mike Morell to round up 51 intelligence “authorities” to lie to the American people that the Hunter Biden laptop under FBI wraps was somehow a product of “Russian disinformation” and not authentic (a claim even Hunter Biden could not make).
That gambit was designed to fuel Biden in the upcoming debate and indeed warp the election itself. And it did.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has a similar politicized record, as one of the principles seeding the 2016 Clinton-campaign lie that a mythical Trump server was communicating with the Russians and thus proof of “Russian collusion”.
Sullivan, remember, just a week before the Hamas slaughter assured us that "The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
So Hamas kills, while we tweet and delete….
Published on Twitter 10/09/23 4:37 PM
They Kill, While Our Government Tweets and Deletes….
If wild reports are true that the inhuman Hamas will execute dozens of civilian hostages, and if it is further accurate that there are rumored Americans among them—and if Americans then are to be executed by Hamas—aside from a military response, the United States will have to change radically its policies in the Middle East.
In the last 32 months they have been proven utterly disastrous. Hamas has gone full ISIS, and is now in addition reportedly beheading captured Israeli soldiers.
Note that the Mahmoud Abbas, “president” for life of the PNA, and a recipient of U.S. aid, has been cheering on Hamas.
So of course have the usual suspects, such as the hard Western Left, the Ivy-League pampered student crowd, the Squad constituencies, the Taliban, Qatar, especially Iran, the parent of the current mass killing, and even Turkey.
Is it the mass mutilations, the rapes, the desecrations of corpses, the beheadings, the murdering of women, the elderly, and children, that so excites them all—as if they were gleefully watching sacrificial victims marched up to the top of an Aztec temple in ancient Tenochtitlán?
Or rather is their frenzy due to unspoken terror that Hamas at last has gone too far in its premodern savagery? There are now no more of its patrons with the power to call off the IDF. And so they may finally get the existential war that Hamas always for decades had bragged about and begged for.
And the proper response to all this here in the U.S.?
All monies to the West Bank and Gaza should be immediately cut off. The Iran transfers, if our State Department’s pleas are correct that they are not yet finalized, should be stopped immediately.
Sanctions and embargos should be placed on all Iranian exports. The alternative would be to keep subsidizing those who provide the wherewithal for murderers, rapists and precivilizational mutilators. If it is true that Hamas killer-masterminds have been residing in Qatar, and, as often has been alleged, enjoying Qatar as a financial clearing-house for terrorist operations, and given Qatar has been blaming Israel for its own murdered, then why do we persist in basing the United States Central Command (USCC) and United State Air Force Central Command (USAFCC) at Qatar government facilities?
There are, of course, realist arguments for our relationship with Qatar. But the world in the Middle East has now irrevocably changed and we need to make the necessary adjustments and separate from this de facto Al Jazeerist enemy.
Expect some terrorists to attempt to join the swarm at our open border. And soon “refugees” from Gaza and the West Bank will be likely demanding asylum here in the Great Satan.
In reaction, we should not only bar all travel from Palestinian territories into the US, as well as from Iran and Qatar, but yank all visas of any of those nationals who currently reside in the U.S. and send them home to enjoy the advantages now offered on nightly video displays in their own native countries.
The national security team of this administration—gifts from the failed Obama administration that is responsible for much of the current Middle East mess— remains confused and inept.
And that’s a charitable assessment. It of course starts at the top. Joe Biden is neither physically nor cognitively up to the task of Commander in Chief in a crisis. He has more or less disappeared other than offering an occasionally brief appearance where he mumbles about standing with Israel and then vanishes again.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently deleted a tweet calling for an immediate cease-fire–music to the ears of Hamas and Iran.
Why? Does he believe it is moral to allow Hamas to murder 900 Jews, beat their chests about such savagery, and then head home with human trophies to be tortured and executed without a response?
Blinken noted that he and the Turkish foreign minister had talks that led to such an absurd statement.
And what about Turkey, the erstwhile Obama key to the Middle East?
Its intrusive armed drone was shot down recently in Syria by the US Air Force and remains an unapologetic pro-Hamas partisan.
And whether long-term it can remain in NATO—long opposing Sweden’s entry, chronic overflights of the Greek islands in the Aegean, supplier of weapons to Russia, threatening to send missiles into Athens, a security risk anytime it receives US weapons—is a real concern, given it has the largest, non-US army in NATO and hosts a nuclear-armed U.S. base.
Blinken also blasted critics who deplored his outreach to Iran, disparaging them as misinforming and misinformed.
He is petulant because he knows that the Iranian expectation of an upcoming $6 billion US-driven cash transfer (another sick idea to buy back hostages from a murderous Tehran) gives them in the here and now fungible opportunities to send more cash and arms into the hands of anti-Israeli terrorists.
As far as Iran’s role in the Hamas orgy of killing, Blinken also declared that there is no evidence of "anything that shows us that Iran was directly involved in this attack, in planning it or in carrying it out.”
No one but you, Secretary Blinken, believes that. When one remembers Blinken’s Palestinian Affairs office in the State Department and its even worse ceasefire tweet, which, like Blinken’s, disappeared without comment, the appointment of the Iranian megaphone Robert Malley (currently under investigation by the FBI) as our point man on the bankrupt Iran Deal, and Blinken’s recent brag about all the hundreds of millions of dollars we have sent to the Palestinians, the picture is one of partisan incompetence.
That pattern goes all the way back to the 2021 Chinese humiliation in Anchorage of both Blinken and Jake Sullivan.
Or perhaps both were suspect even earlier when we recall it was campaign honcho Blinken who on the eve of the 2020 election apparently thought up the nasty idea of calling on ex-interim CIA director Mike Morell to round up 51 intelligence “authorities” to lie to the American people that the Hunter Biden laptop under FBI wraps was somehow a product of “Russian disinformation” and not authentic (a claim even Hunter Biden could not make).
That gambit was designed to fuel Biden in the upcoming debate and indeed warp the election itself. And it did.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has a similar politicized record, as one of the principles seeding the 2016 Clinton-campaign lie that a mythical Trump server was communicating with the Russians and thus proof of “Russian collusion”.
Sullivan, remember, just a week before the Hamas slaughter assured us that "The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
So Hamas kills, while we tweet and delete….
